We’re just past the halfway point of 2023; so to commemorate the occasion a few of you friendly neighborhood SunBreakers took stock of the films we’ve seen so far. Although no film made it on all our lists, three rose to the top: Past Lives, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and Asteroid City. Luckily, all three are still playing in theaters if you need a break from the incoming hot summer weather.

Below, we revisit some of our favorites.

Past Lives (Celine Song)

Chris: SIFF’s opening night feature was a note-perfect story about two childhood best friends who try reconnecting in adulthood after years of not speaking or talking and living on separate continents. I cried my eyes out pretty much throughout the entire thing. 

Josh: Both shimmery and precise, Celine Song’s debut captures the longing for lost loves and homelands left behind. Intricately structured, it opens as a mystery about connections between strangers at a bar and spends the ensuing hours answering the question by establishing relationships, connections, and identity between two (or three) people across decades. It’s rare that something you saw only a few weeks into the year clings to the top of your list, but Past Lives is not fucking around. 

Past Lives is currently playing in theaters

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson)

Morgen: Tony nailed it in his review. For an animated feature, the intensity and drama filling the screen throughout this lengthy film is almost overwhelming. It’s a completely different feel from all the multi-verse, multi-film series, super hero, overdone adventure stories we’ve been saturated with over the last decade. In the Spiderverse saga you connect with the characters. Easter eggs abound, and storylines you actually want to sink your teeth into.

Josh: Just when I was ready to give up on superhero stories and the decreasing returns on low-stakes multiversal storytelling, a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man (and his amazing friends) swung in and restored my faith in the genre (at least for a couple weeks until the next one bombed). The continuing adventures of Miles Morales, Gwen Stacy, and a kaleidoscopic multiverse of spider-people are rendered in myriad animation styles – each heartstopping and dazzling in their own way – and the story hits deep emotional beats while interrogating the very notion of canon and heroism. It’s beautiful, genuinely funny, and thrilling to watch. The concluding chapter can’t come soon enough. 

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is currently playing in theaters

Asteroid City (Wes Anderson)

Morgen: The oddest and most meta Anderson film to date, I want to watch it at least a couple more times to really wrap my head around it. Beautiful cinematography, postcard-like framing in every scene and the cheekiness we’ve all come to expect.

Josh: From my perspective Wes Anderson hasn’t made a bad movie yet, and his twelfth feature lands in the top tier of his filmography, tripling down on his ever-distinctive visual style and nested storytelling, jewelboxes within dioramas within within dollhouses. A play within a television show within a movie, the innermost – and most “artificial” – story concerns an alien encounter in a picture-perfect desert town that’s home to an observatory, a diner, a giant meteorite crater, and a convention of precocious teens and their melancholic parents. Around the periphery, we see the formation of the (fictional) play and a meditation on why we make art, what we bring to it. It’s a clever device and as close as an explanation for his hallmark deadpan dialog amid excessive whimsical set design as we’re going to get. Amid a thousand stars, Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson shine brightest. 

Asteroid City is currently playing in theaters

Individual lists

Below, our individual nominations, along with links to previous coverage of our favorite films.